What should India do about the rankings?

India seems to be suffering from ranking fever. This is a serious problem that periodically sweeps across countries with the national media echoing statements from university heads and bureaucrats about being in the top one hundred or two hundred of something in the next few years or passionate claims that rankings do not reflect the needs of local society or that the uniquely transformative features of this or that institution -- how dare they ignore our sensitivity training or sustainability programs! --  are not recognised by the rankers.

There is  now a lot of debate about which is the best university in India and also about why Indian institutions, especially the sometimes lauded Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have a modest impact on the international rankings.

So what do the various rankings say about the quality of Indian universities (counting the IITs and other Institutes)? Starting with Webometrics, which measures the Internet presence of universities,  first place in India goes to IIT Bombay, 517th in the world, followed by IIT Madras, The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, IIT Kanpur and the University of Delhi.

Moving on to research based rankings, only one Indian university is ranked in  Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) top 500, and that is the IISc in the 301-400 band.

Scimago Institutional Rankings in their 2013 default list of number of publications, also puts IISc in first place in India, followed by IIT Kharagur, IIT Delhi, the University of Delhi, and IIT Madras.

The Leiden Ranking has the IISc in first place for number of publications although IIT Roorkee is first for publications in high quality journals.

Looking at the research-only rankings then, the best bet for top place would be the IISc which is ranked first in India by ARWU, Scimago, and, for number of publications, by Leiden Ranking, although for quality of research the IITs at Roorkee, Delhi and Guwahati perform comparatively well.

Moving on to rankings that attempt to assess factors other than research, we find that in the most recent QS World and Asian University Rankings first place in India goes to IIT Delhi with IIT Bombay second and IIT Kanpur third.

Last year's Times Higher Education world rankings produced an unusual result. Panjab University (PU) was ranked in the 226-250 band well ahead of the IITs Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Roorkee in the 350 - 400. In this case, Panjab university's feat was entirely due to its massive score for citations, 84.7 compared to IIT Delhi's 38.5, a score that was in stark contrast to a very poor 14 for research.

The main reason for PU's whopping score for citations appears to be that a few of its physicists are involved in the Large Hadron Collider project, which involves more than 2000 physicists in more than 150 research centers and 37 countries and consequently produces a huge number of citations. PU gets the credit for all of those citations even though its contribution to the cited papers is extremely small.

This only works because the overall number of papers produced is low. Hundreds or even thousands of citations are of little incremental value if they are spread out over thousands or tens of thousands of papers.

It would be unwise for other Indian universities to emulate PU's approach to get into the THE rankings. For one thing they would have to keep total publications low. For another, they may find that highly cited researchers might be a tempting target for universities in the US or Australia. And it does not work for any other ranking.

It is noticeable that The IISc is not included in the QS or THE rankings, presumably as a result of its own choice.

Should India's universities try to improve their ranking performance? Perhaps, but it would be better if they focused on improving their research performance, admissions policies, administration and selection processes. And here there is a much bigger problem for India, the utterly dismal performance of the country's school system.

In 2009, students from Tamil Nadu and Himachel Pradesh, which do better than the Indian average on social and economic development measures, took the PISA test. They were just ahead of the lowest ranked Kirgystan.

Riaz Haq writes:

"In Tamil Nadu, only 17% of students were estimated to possess proficiency in reading that is at or above the baseline needed to be effective and productive in life. In Himachal Pradesh, this level is 11%. “This compares to 81% of students performing at or above the baseline level in reading in the OECD countries, on an average,” said the study. 
The average Indian child taking part in PISA2009+ is 40 to 50 points behind the worst students in the economic superstars. Even the best performers in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh - the top 5 percent who India will need in science and technology to complete globally - were almost 100 points behind the average child in Singapore and 83 points behind the average Korean - and a staggering 250 points behind the best in the best.
The average child in HP & TN is right at the level of the worst OECD or American students (only 1.5 or 7.5 points ahead). Contrary to President Obama's oft-expressed concerns about American students ability to compete with their Indian counterparts, the average 15-year-old Indian placed in an American school would be among the weakest students in the classroom, says Lant Pritchett of Harvard University. Even the best TN/HP students are 24 points behind the average American 15 year old."

If this does not change, there is very little that anyone can do to improve the status of India's universities, apart from importing large numbers of Finnish, Chinese or Korean students, teachers and researchers.